C. Worrell (Eds.), (pp. 345–359). American Psychological Association.
Parenthetical citation: (Aron et al., 2019)
Narrative citation: Aron et al. (2019)
Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Culture. In . Retrieved September 9, 2019, from |
Parenthetical citation: (Merriam-Webster, n.d.)
Narrative citation: Merriam-Webster (n.d.)
National Cancer Institute. (2019). (NIH Publication No. 18-2059). U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health. |
Parenthetical citation: (National Cancer Institute, 2019)
Narrative citation: National Cancer Institute (2019)
The specific agency responsible for the report appears as the author. The names of parent agencies not present in the group author name appear in the source element as the publisher. This creates concise in-text citations and complete reference list entries.
Harvard University. (2019, August 28). [Video]. YouTube. |
Parenthetical citation: (Harvard University, 2019)
Narrative citation: Harvard University (2019)
APA Databases [@APA_Databases]. (2019, September 5). [Tweet]. Twitter. Gates, B. [@BillGates]. (2019, September 7). [Thumbnail with link attached] [Tweet]. Twitter. |
Parenthetical citations: (APA Databases, 2019; Gates, 2019)
Narrative citations: APA Databases (2019) and Gates (2019)
News From Science. (2019, June 21). [Image attached] [Status update]. Facebook. |
Parenthetical citation: (News From Science, 2019)
Narrative citation: News From Science (2019)
Fagan, J. (2019, March 25). . OER Commons. Retrieved September 17, 2019, from National Institute of Mental Health. (2018, July). . U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health. Woodyatt, A. (2019, September 10). . CNN. World Health Organization. (2018, May 24). . |
Parenthetical citations: (Fagan, 2019; National Institute of Mental Health, 2018; Woodyatt, 2019; World Health Organization, 2018)
Narrative citations: Fagan (2019), National Institute of Mental Health (2018), Woodyatt (2019), and World Health Organization (2018)
The following supplemental example references are mention in the Publication Manual:
Archival document and collections are not presented in the APA Publication Manual, Seventh Edition . This content is available only on the APA Style website . This guidance has been expanded from the 6th edition.
Archival sources include letters, unpublished manuscripts, limited-circulation brochures and pamphlets, in-house institutional and corporate documents, clippings, and other documents, as well as such nontextual materials as photographs and apparatus, that are in the personal possession of an author, form part of an institutional collection, or are stored in an archive such as the Archives of the History of American Psychology at the University of Akron or the APA Archives. For any documents like these that are available on the open web or via a database (subscription or nonsubscription), follow the reference templates shown in Chapter 10 of the Publication Manual.
The general format for the reference for an archival work includes the author, date, title, and source. The reference examples shown on this page may be modified for collections requiring more or less specific information to locate materials, for different types of collections, or for additional descriptive information (e.g., a translation of a letter). Authors may choose to list correspondence from their own personal collections, but correspondence from other private collections should be listed only with the permission of the collector.
Keep in mind the following principles when creating references to archival documents and collections:
Frank, L. K. (1935, February 4). [Letter to Robert M. Ogden]. Rockefeller Archive Center (GEB Series 1.3, Box 371, Folder 3877), Tarrytown, NY, United States.
Zacharius, G. P. (1953, August 15). [Letter to William Rickel (W. Rickel, Trans.)]. Copy in possession of Hendrika Vande Kemp.
Allport, G. W. (1930–1967). Correspondence. Gordon W. Allport Papers (HUG 4118.10), Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, MA, United States.
To cite specific letters in the text, provide the author and range of years as shown in the reference list entry, plus details about who wrote the specific letter to whom and when the specific letter was written.
Berliner, A. (1959). Notes for a lecture on reminiscences of Wundt and Leipzig. Anna Berliner Memoirs (Box M50), Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron, Akron, OH, United States.
Allport, A. (presumed). (ca. 1937). Marion Taylor today—by the biographer [Unpublished manuscript]. Marion Taylor Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA, United States.
Subcommittee on Mental Hygiene Personnel in School Programs. (1949, November 5–6). Meeting of Subcommittee on Mental Hygiene Personnel in School Programs. David Shakow Papers (M1360), Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron, Akron, OH, United States.
Smith, M. B. (1989, August 12). Interview by C. A. Kiesler [Tape recording]. President’s Oral History Project, American Psychological Association, APA Archives, Washington, DC, United States.
Sparkman, C. F. (1973). An oral history with Dr. Colley F. Sparkman/Interviewer: Orley B. Caudill. Mississippi Oral History Program (Vol. 289), University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, MS, United States.
Psychoanalysis institute to open. (1948, September 18). [Clipping from an unidentified Dayton, OH, United States, newspaper]. Copy in possession of author.
Sci-Art Publishers. (1935). Sci-Art publications [Brochure]. Roback Papers (HUGFP 104.50, Box 2, Folder “Miscellaneous Psychological Materials”), Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, MA, United States.
[Photographs of Robert M. Yerkes]. (ca. 1917–1954). Robert Mearns Yerkes Papers (Box 137, Folder 2292), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, New Haven, CT, United States.
U.S. Census Bureau. (1880). 1880 U.S. census: Defective, dependent, and delinquent classes schedule: Virginia [Microfilm]. NARA Microfilm Publication T1132 (Rolls 33–34), National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC, United States.
Read the full APA guidelines on citing ChatGPT
OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Mar 14 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat
Author: The author of the model is OpenAI.
Date: The date is the year of the version you used. Following the template in Section 10.10, you need to include only the year, not the exact date. The version number provides the specific date information a reader might need.
Title: The name of the model is “ChatGPT,” so that serves as the title and is italicized in your reference, as shown in the template. Although OpenAI labels unique iterations (i.e., ChatGPT-3, ChatGPT-4), they are using “ChatGPT” as the general name of the model, with updates identified with version numbers.
The version number is included after the title in parentheses. The format for the version number in ChatGPT references includes the date because that is how OpenAI is labeling the versions. Different large language models or software might use different version numbering; use the version number in the format the author or publisher provides, which may be a numbering system (e.g., Version 2.0) or other methods.
Bracketed text is used in references for additional descriptions when they are needed to help a reader understand what’s being cited. References for a number of common sources, such as journal articles and books, do not include bracketed descriptions, but things outside of the typical peer-reviewed system often do. In the case of a reference for ChatGPT, provide the descriptor “Large language model” in square brackets. OpenAI describes ChatGPT-4 as a “large multimodal model,” so that description may be provided instead if you are using ChatGPT-4. Later versions and software or models from other companies may need different descriptions, based on how the publishers describe the model. The goal of the bracketed text is to briefly describe the kind of model to your reader.
Source: When the publisher name and the author name are the same, do not repeat the publisher name in the source element of the reference, and move directly to the URL. This is the case for ChatGPT. The URL for ChatGPT is https://chat.openai.com/chat . For other models or products for which you may create a reference, use the URL that links as directly as possible to the source (i.e., the page where you can access the model, not the publisher’s homepage).
Works included in a reference list.
The reference list provides a reliable way for readers to identify and locate the works cited in a paper. APA Style papers generally include reference lists, not bibliographies.
In general, each work cited in the text must appear in the reference list, and each work in the reference list must be cited in the text. Check your work carefully before submitting your manuscript or course assignment to ensure no works cited in the text are missing from the reference list and vice versa, with only the following exceptions.
There are a few kinds of works that are not included in a reference list. Usually a work is not included because readers cannot recover it or because the mention is so broad that readers do not need a reference list entry to understand the use.
Information on works included in a reference list is covered in Sections 2.12 and 8.4 of the APA Publication Manual, Seventh Edition
*This guidance has been expanded from the 6th edition.*
The DOI or URL is the final component of a reference list entry. Because so much scholarship is available and/or retrieved online, most reference list entries end with either a DOI or a URL.
Follow these guidelines for including DOIs and URLs in references:
Follow these guidelines to format DOIs and URLs:
https://doi.org/ xxxxx
When a DOI or URL is long or complex, you may use shortDOIs or shortened URLs if desired.
Home / Guides / Citation Guides / How to Cite Sources
Here is a complete list for how to cite sources. Most of these guides present citation guidance and examples in MLA, APA, and Chicago.
If you’re looking for general information on MLA or APA citations , the EasyBib Writing Center was designed for you! It has articles on what’s needed in an MLA in-text citation , how to format an APA paper, what an MLA annotated bibliography is, making an MLA works cited page, and much more!
The Modern Language Association created the MLA Style, currently in its 9th edition, to provide researchers with guidelines for writing and documenting scholarly borrowings. Most often used in the humanities, MLA style (or MLA format ) has been adopted and used by numerous other disciplines, in multiple parts of the world.
MLA provides standard rules to follow so that most research papers are formatted in a similar manner. This makes it easier for readers to comprehend the information. The MLA in-text citation guidelines, MLA works cited standards, and MLA annotated bibliography instructions provide scholars with the information they need to properly cite sources in their research papers, articles, and assignments.
The American Psychological Association created the APA citation style in 1929 as a way to help psychologists, anthropologists, and even business managers establish one common way to cite sources and present content.
APA is used when citing sources for academic articles such as journals, and is intended to help readers better comprehend content, and to avoid language bias wherever possible. The APA style (or APA format ) is now in its 7th edition, and provides citation style guides for virtually any type of resource.
The Chicago/Turabian style of citing sources is generally used when citing sources for humanities papers, and is best known for its requirement that writers place bibliographic citations at the bottom of a page (in Chicago-format footnotes ) or at the end of a paper (endnotes).
The Turabian and Chicago citation styles are almost identical, but the Turabian style is geared towards student published papers such as theses and dissertations, while the Chicago style provides guidelines for all types of publications. This is why you’ll commonly see Chicago style and Turabian style presented together. The Chicago Manual of Style is currently in its 17th edition, and Turabian’s A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations is in its 8th edition.
The world of citations may seem cut and dry, but there’s more to them than just specific capitalization rules, MLA in-text citations , and other formatting specifications. Citations have been helping researches document their sources for hundreds of years, and are a great way to learn more about a particular subject area.
Ever wonder what sets all the different styles apart, or how they came to be in the first place? Read on for some interesting facts about citations!
You may be familiar with MLA and APA citation styles, but there are actually thousands of citation styles used for all different academic disciplines all across the world. Deciding which one to use can be difficult, so be sure to ask you instructor which one you should be using for your next paper.
While a majority of citation styles are named for the specific organizations that publish them (i.e. APA is published by the American Psychological Association, and MLA format is named for the Modern Language Association), some are actually named after individuals. The most well-known example of this is perhaps Turabian style, named for Kate L. Turabian, an American educator and writer. She developed this style as a condensed version of the Chicago Manual of Style in order to present a more concise set of rules to students.
How specific can citation styles get? The answer is very. For example, the “Flavour and Fragrance Journal” style is based on a bimonthly, peer-reviewed scientific journal published since 1985 by John Wiley & Sons. It publishes original research articles, reviews and special reports on all aspects of flavor and fragrance. Another example is “Nordic Pulp and Paper Research,” a style used by an international scientific magazine covering science and technology for the areas of wood or bio-mass constituents.
The US Census Bureau estimates that approximately 39.5 million people live in the state of California. Meanwhile, about 43 million citations were made on EasyBib from January to March of 2018. That’s a lot of citations.
The word “citations” can be traced back literally thousands of years to the Latin word “citare” meaning “to summon, urge, call; put in sudden motion, call forward; rouse, excite.” The word then took on its more modern meaning and relevance to writing papers in the 1600s, where it became known as the “act of citing or quoting a passage from a book, etc.”
The concept of citations always stays the same. It is a means of preventing plagiarism and demonstrating where you relied on outside sources. The specific style rules, however, can and do change regularly. For example, in 2018 alone, 46 new citation styles were introduced , and 106 updates were made to exiting styles. At EasyBib, we are always on the lookout for ways to improve our styles and opportunities to add new ones to our list.
Here are the ways accurate citations can help your students achieve academic success, and how you can answer the dreaded question, “why should I cite my sources?”
Citing their sources makes sure that the reader can differentiate the student’s original thoughts from those of other researchers. Not only does this make sure that the sources they use receive proper credit for their work, it ensures that the student receives deserved recognition for their unique contributions to the topic. Whether the student is citing in MLA format , APA format , or any other style, citations serve as a natural way to place a student’s work in the broader context of the subject area, and serve as an easy way to gauge their commitment to the project.
Having many citations from a wide variety of sources related to their idea means that the student is working on a well-researched and respected subject. Citing sources that back up their claim creates room for fact-checking and further research . And, if they can cite a few sources that have the converse opinion or idea, and then demonstrate to the reader why they believe that that viewpoint is wrong by again citing credible sources, the student is well on their way to winning over the reader and cementing their point of view.
The point of research projects is not to regurgitate information that can already be found elsewhere. We have Google for that! What the student’s project should aim to do is promote an original idea or a spin on an existing idea, and use reliable sources to promote that idea. Copying or directly referencing a source without proper citation can lead to not only a poor grade, but accusations of academic dishonesty. By citing their sources regularly and accurately, students can easily avoid the trap of plagiarism , and promote further research on their topic.
By researching sources to back up and promote their ideas, students are becoming better researchers without even knowing it! Each time a new source is read or researched, the student is becoming more engaged with the project and is developing a deeper understanding of the subject area. Proper citations demonstrate a breadth of the student’s reading and dedication to the project itself. By creating citations, students are compelled to make connections between their sources and discern research patterns. Each time they complete this process, they are helping themselves become better researchers and writers overall.
Make in-text/parenthetical citations as you need them.
As you are writing your paper, be sure to include references within the text that correspond with references in a works cited or bibliography. These are usually called in-text citations or parenthetical citations in MLA and APA formats. The most effective time to complete these is directly after you have made your reference to another source. For instance, after writing the line from Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities : “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…,” you would include a citation like this (depending on your chosen citation style):
(Dickens 11).
This signals to the reader that you have referenced an outside source. What’s great about this system is that the in-text citations serve as a natural list for all of the citations you have made in your paper, which will make completing the works cited page a whole lot easier. After you are done writing, all that will be left for you to do is scan your paper for these references, and then build a works cited page that includes a citation for each one.
Need help creating an MLA works cited page ? Try the MLA format generator on EasyBib.com! We also have a guide on how to format an APA reference page .
While reading up on paper formatting may not sound exciting, being aware of how your paper should look early on in the paper writing process is super important. Citation styles can dictate more than just the appearance of the citations themselves, but rather can impact the layout of your paper as a whole, with specific guidelines concerning margin width, title treatment, and even font size and spacing. Knowing how to organize your paper before you start writing will ensure that you do not receive a low grade for something as trivial as forgetting a hanging indent.
Don’t know where to start? Here’s a formatting guide on APA format .
Collecting outside sources that support your research and specific topic is a critical step in writing an effective paper. But before you run to the library and grab the first 20 books you can lay your hands on, keep in mind that selecting a source to include in your paper should not be taken lightly. Before you proceed with using it to backup your ideas, run a quick Internet search for it and see if other scholars in your field have written about it as well. Check to see if there are book reviews about it or peer accolades. If you spot something that seems off to you, you may want to consider leaving it out of your work. Doing this before your start making citations can save you a ton of time in the long run.
Finished with your paper? It may be time to run it through a grammar and plagiarism checker , like the one offered by EasyBib Plus. If you’re just looking to brush up on the basics, our grammar guides are ready anytime you are.
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Mla format: everything you need to know and more.
Filled with a wide variety of examples and visuals, our Citation Machine® MLA guide will help you master the citation process. Learn how to cite websites, books, journal articles, magazines, newspapers, films, social media, and more!
MLA Citation Generator | Website | Books | Journal Articles | YouTube | Images | Movies | Interview | PDFs
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American Psychological Association (APA) style includes parenthetical in-text citations and a reference list .
APA uses parenthetical citations as its form of in-text citation. Provide a parenthetical citation before the period directly following the information you are citing. These citations should correspond to a more detailed citation in the reference list but only need to specify a page number if directly quoting or borrowing from the source material. The essential elements for this in-text citation are the author's last name and the date for the specific publications. The last name may be omitted if the sentence states or makes clear the source material.
APA uses a reference list , an alphabetized list of sources following the end of the book or paper, for its complete list of sources referenced. This list should be titled "References" in bold and alphabetized by the first item in the citation, which, in most cases, is the author's last name. Each reference from this list must be cited in your paper and vice versa.
Author Last Name, Author First Initial. (Year of publication). Title . Publisher Name.
Print Articles
Author Last Name, Author First Initial, & Author Last Name, Author First Initial. (Year). Article Title. Periodical Title , volume number(issue number), pages.
Electronic Articles
Author Last Name, Author First Initial. (Year). Article Title. Periodical Title , volume number(issue number), pages. doi or static url.
Physical Images/Artwork
Artist Last Name, Artist First Initial. (Year). Artwork Title [medium]. Host Institution Name, City, State, Country. URL of institution.
Electronic Images/Artwork
Artist Last Name, Artist First Initial. (Year). Image Title [medium]. Source Title. URL of image.
Standard case :
"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet , consectetur adipiscing elit" (Last name, 2000, p.10).
If the author is not available , the title of the source may be used:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet , consectetur adipiscing elit ("Source title", 2000, pp.10-11).
If multiple authors cited have the same last name , use the author's first initial along with their last name:
"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet , consectetur adipiscing elit" (E. Bronte, 1847, p.10).
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet , consectetur adipiscing elit (C. Bronte, 1847, p.10).
Archival material :
Child, J. (1974). Journal, 1974 . [Unpublished journal]. Papers of Julia Child, 1925-1993(MC 644, item 4). Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute, https://id.lib.harvard.edu/ead/c/ sch00222c00006 /catalog .
Child, P. (1967). Julia Child at the White House [Photograph]. Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute, https://id.lib.harvard.edu/images/olvwork539731/urn-3:RAD.SCHL:4510469/catalog.
Beck, S., Bertholle, L., & Child, J. (1961). Mastering the art of French cooking. Knopf.
Child, J. & Child, P. (1968). The French chef cookbook . Alfred A. Knopf .
Journal article :
Muneal, M. (2011). Studies in Popular Culture , 34(1), 152–154. www.jstor.org/stable/23416357.
Nussbaum, D. (2005). "In Julia Child's Kitchen, October 5 1998". Gastronomica , 5(3), 29-38. doi: 10.1525/gfc.2005.5.3.29.
Harvard University Digital Accessibility Policy
Generate citations in APA format quickly and automatically, with MyBib!
An APA citation generator is a software tool that will automatically format academic citations in the American Psychological Association (APA) style.
It will usually request vital details about a source -- like the authors, title, and publish date -- and will output these details with the correct punctuation and layout required by the official APA style guide.
Formatted citations created by a generator can be copied into the bibliography of an academic paper as a way to give credit to the sources referenced in the main body of the paper.
College-level and post-graduate students are most likely to use an APA citation generator, because APA style is the most favored style at these learning levels. Before college, in middle and high school, MLA style is more likely to be used. In other parts of the world styles such as Harvard (UK and Australia) and DIN 1505 (Europe) are used more often.
Like almost every other citation style, APA style can be cryptic and hard to understand when formatting citations. Citations can take an unreasonable amount of time to format manually, and it is easy to accidentally include errors. By using a citation generator to do this work you will:
In academia, bibliographies are graded on their accuracy against the official APA rulebook, so it is important for students to ensure their citations are formatted correctly. Special attention should also be given to ensure the entire document (including main body) is structured according to the APA guidelines. Our complete APA format guide has everything you need know to make sure you get it right (including examples and diagrams).
Our APA generator was built with a focus on simplicity and speed. To generate a formatted reference list or bibliography just follow these steps:
MyBib supports the following for APA style:
⚙️ Styles | APA 6 & APA 7 |
---|---|
📚 Sources | Websites, books, journals, newspapers |
🔎 Autocite | Yes |
📥 Download to | Microsoft Word, Google Docs |
Daniel is a qualified librarian, former teacher, and citation expert. He has been contributing to MyBib since 2018.
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Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.
Note: This page reflects the latest version of the APA Publication Manual (i.e., APA 7), which released in October 2019. The equivalent resource for the older APA 6 style can be found here .
Reference citations in text are covered on pages 261-268 of the Publication Manual. What follows are some general guidelines for referring to the works of others in your essay.
Note: On pages 117-118, the Publication Manual suggests that authors of research papers should use the past tense or present perfect tense for signal phrases that occur in the literature review and procedure descriptions (for example, Jones (1998) found or Jones (1998) has found ...). Contexts other than traditionally-structured research writing may permit the simple present tense (for example, Jones (1998) finds ).
When using APA format, follow the author-date method of in-text citation. This means that the author's last name and the year of publication for the source should appear in the text, like, for example, (Jones, 1998). One complete reference for each source should appear in the reference list at the end of the paper.
If you are referring to an idea from another work but NOT directly quoting the material, or making reference to an entire book, article or other work, you only have to make reference to the author and year of publication and not the page number in your in-text reference.
On the other hand, if you are directly quoting or borrowing from another work, you should include the page number at the end of the parenthetical citation. Use the abbreviation “p.” (for one page) or “pp.” (for multiple pages) before listing the page number(s). Use an en dash for page ranges. For example, you might write (Jones, 1998, p. 199) or (Jones, 1998, pp. 199–201). This information is reiterated below.
Regardless of how they are referenced, all sources that are cited in the text must appear in the reference list at the end of the paper.
In-text citation capitalization, quotes, and italics/underlining
( Note: in your References list, only the first word of a title will be capitalized: Writing new media .)
If you are directly quoting from a work, you will need to include the author, year of publication, and page number for the reference (preceded by "p." for a single page and “pp.” for a span of multiple pages, with the page numbers separated by an en dash).
You can introduce the quotation with a signal phrase that includes the author's last name followed by the date of publication in parentheses.
If you do not include the author’s name in the text of the sentence, place the author's last name, the year of publication, and the page number in parentheses after the quotation.
Place direct quotations that are 40 words or longer in a free-standing block of typewritten lines and omit quotation marks. Start the quotation on a new line, indented 1/2 inch from the left margin, i.e., in the same place you would begin a new paragraph. Type the entire quotation on the new margin, and indent the first line of any subsequent paragraph within the quotation 1/2 inch from the new margin. Maintain double-spacing throughout, but do not add an extra blank line before or after it. The parenthetical citation should come after the closing punctuation mark.
Because block quotation formatting is difficult for us to replicate in the OWL's content management system, we have simply provided a screenshot of a generic example below.
Formatting example for block quotations in APA 7 style.
Direct quotations from sources that do not contain pages should not reference a page number. Instead, you may reference another logical identifying element: a paragraph, a chapter number, a section number, a table number, or something else. Older works (like religious texts) can also incorporate special location identifiers like verse numbers. In short: pick a substitute for page numbers that makes sense for your source.
If you are paraphrasing an idea from another work, you only have to make reference to the author and year of publication in your in-text reference and may omit the page numbers. APA guidelines, however, do encourage including a page range for a summary or paraphrase when it will help the reader find the information in a longer work.
In APA format, the source indicates where readers can retrieve the cited work. Sources fall into two categories, just as titles do. Works that are part of a greater whole and works that stand alone. The requirements for each one are as follows:
The general guidelines for formatting the source in an APA style reference are listed below:
From APA Publication Manual, 7th, ed., Ch. 9.23 Definition of Source, 9.24 Format of the Source Element, & 9.25 Periodical Sources
Source element for an online journal article:
McCauley, S. M., & Christiansen, M. H. (2019). Language learning as language use: A cross-linguistic model of child language development. Psychological Review, 126 (1), 1-51. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000126
Source information for a book:
Garton, A. (2005). E xploring cognitive development: The child as problem solver . Blackwell.
What is a citation.
Citations are a way of giving credit when certain material in your work came from another source. It also gives your readers the information necessary to find that source again-- it provides an important roadmap to your research process. Whenever you use sources such as books, journals or websites in your research, you must give credit to the original author by citing the source.
Scholarship is a conversation and scholars use citations not only to give credit to original creators and thinkers, but also to add strength and authority to their own work. By citing their sources, scholars are placing their work in a specific context to show where they “fit” within the larger conversation. Citations are also a great way to leave a trail intended to help others who may want to explore the conversation or use the sources in their own work.
In short, citations
(1) give credit
(2) add strength and authority to your work
(3) place your work in a specific context
(4) leave a trail for other scholars
"Good citations should reveal your sources, not conceal them. They should honeslty reflect the research you conducted." (Lipson 4)
Lipson, Charles. "Why Cite?" Cite Right: A Quick Guide to Citation Styles--MLA, APA, Chicago, the Sciences, Professions, and More . Chicago: U of Chicago, 2006. Print.
Different subject disciplines call for citation information to be written in very specific order, capitalization, and punctuation. There are therefore many different style formats. Three popular citation formats are MLA Style (for humanities articles) and APA or Chicago (for social sciences articles).
MLA style (print journal article):
Whisenant, Warren A. "How Women Have Fared as Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Since the Passage of Title IX." Sex Roles Vol. 49.3 (2003): 179-182.
APA style (print journal article):
Whisenant, W. A. (2003) How Women Have Fared as Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Since the Passage of Title IX. Sex Roles , 49 (3), 179-182.
Chicago style (print journal article):
Whisenant, Warren A. "How Women Have Fared as Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Since the Passage of Title IX." Sex Roles 49, no. 3 (2003): 179-182.
No matter which style you use, all citations require the same basic information:
You are most likely to have easy access to all of your citation information when you find it in the first place. Take note of this information up front, and it will be much easier to cite it effectively later.
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Cite This For Me’s open-access generator is an automated citation machine that turns any of your sources into citations in just a click. Using a citation generator helps students to integrate referencing into their research and writing routine; turning a time-consuming ordeal into a simple task.
A citation machine is essentially a works cited generator that accesses information from across the web, drawing the relevant information into a fully-formatted bibliography that clearly presents all of the sources that have contributed to your work.
If you don’t know how to cite correctly, or have a fast-approaching deadline, Cite This For Me’s accurate and intuitive citation machine will lend you the confidence to realise your full academic potential. In order to get a grade that reflects all your hard work, your citations must be accurate and complete. Using a citation maker to create your references not only saves you time but also ensures that you don’t lose valuable marks on your assignment.
Not sure how to format your citations, what citations are, or just want to find out more about Cite This For Me’s citation machine? This guide outlines everything you need to know to equip yourself with the know-how and confidence to research and cite a wide range of diverse sources in your work.
Simply put, referencing is the citing of sources used in essays, articles, research, conferences etc. When another source contributes to your work, you have to give the original owner the appropriate credit. After all, you wouldn’t steal someone else’s possessions so why would you steal their ideas?
Any factual material or ideas you take from another source must be acknowledged in a reference, unless it is common knowledge (e.g. President Kennedy was killed in 1963). Failing to credit all of your sources, even when you’ve paraphrased or completely reworded the information, is plagiarism. Plagiarizing will result in disciplinary action, which can range from losing precious points on your assignment to expulsion from your university.
What’s more, attributing your research infuses credibility and authority into your work, both by supporting your own ideas and by demonstrating the breadth of your research. For many students, crediting sources can be a confusing and tedious process, but it’s a surefire way to improve the quality of your work so it’s essential to get it right. Luckily for you, using Cite This For Me’s citation machine makes creating accurate references easier than ever, leaving more time for you to excel in your studies.
In summary, the referencing process serves three main functions:
Cite This For Me’s citation generator is the most accurate citation machine available, so whether you’re not sure how to format in-text citations or are looking for a foolproof solution to automate a fully-formatted works cited list, this citation machine will solve all of your referencing needs.
Referencing your source material doesn’t just prevent you from losing valuable marks for plagiarism, it also provides all of the information to help your reader find for themselves the book, article, or other item you are citing. The accessible interface of this citation builder makes it easy for you to identify the source you have used – simply enter its unique identifier into the citation machine search bar. If this information is not available you can search for the title or author instead, and then select from the search results that appear below the citation generator.
The good news is that by using tools such as Cite This For Me, which help you work smarter, you don’t need to limit your research to sources that are traditional to cite. In fact, there are no limits to what you can reference, whether it be a YouTube video, website or a tweet.
To use the works cited generator, simply:
*If you require another referencing style for your paper, essay or other academic work, you can select from over 7,500 styles.
Once you have created your Cite This For Me account you will be able to use the citation machine to generate multiple references and save them into a project. Use the highly-rated iOS or Android apps to create references in a flash with your smartphone camera, export your complete bibliography in one go, and much more.
Cite This For Me’s citation maker will generate your reference in two parts; an in-text citation and a full reference to be copied straight into your work.
The citation machine will auto-generate the correct formatting for your works cited list or bibliography depending on your chosen style. For instance, if you select a parenthetical style on the citation machine it will generate an in-text citation in parentheses, along with a full reference to slot into your bibliography. Likewise, if the citation generator is set to a footnote style then it will create a fully-formatted reference for your reference page and bibliography, as well as a corresponding footnote to insert at the bottom of the page containing the relevant source.
Parenthetical referencing examples:
In-text example: A nation has been defined as an imagined community (Anderson, 2006).* Alternative format: Anderson (2006) defined a nation as an imagined community.
*The citation machine will create your references in the first style, but this should be edited if the author’s name already appears in the text.
Bibliography / Works Cited list example: Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined Communities. London: Verso.
A citation style is a set of rules that you, as an academic writer, must follow to ensure the quality and relevance of your work. There are thousands of styles that are used in different academic institutions around the world, but in the US the most common are APA, MLA and Chicago.
The style you need to use will depend on the preference of your professor, discipline or academic institution – so if you’re unsure which style you should be using, consult your department and follow their guidelines exactly, as this is what you’ll be evaluated on when it comes to grading.
Referencing isn’t just there to guard against plagiarism – presenting your research in a clear and consistent way eases the reader’s comprehension. Each style has a different set of rules for both page formatting and referencing. Be sure to adhere to formatting rules such as font type, font size and line spacing to ensure that your work is easily legible. Furthermore, if your work is published as part of an anthology or collected works, each entry will need to be presented in the same style to maintain uniformity throughout. It is important to make sure that you don’t jump from one style to another, so follow the rules carefully to ensure your reference page and bibliography are both accurate and complete.
If you need a hand with your referencing then why not try Cite This For Me’s citation builder? It’s the quickest and easiest way to reference any source, in any style. The citation generator above will create your references in MLA format style as standard, but this powerful citation machine can generate fully-formatted references in thousands of the widely used global college styles – including individual university variations of each style. So, whether your subject requires you to use the APA citation , or your professor has asked you to adopt the Chicago style citation so that your work includes numbered footnotes, we’re sure to have the style you need. Cite This For Me also offers a citation machine and helpful formatting guide for styles such as ASA , IEEE or AMA . To access all of them, simply create your free account and search for your specific style.
Drawing on a wide range of sources greatly enhances the quality of your work, and reading above and beyond your recommended reading list – and then using these sources to support your own thesis – is an excellent way to impress your reader. A clearly presented works cited list or bibliography demonstrates the lengths you have gone to in researching your chosen topic.
Typically, a works cited list starts on a new page at the end of the main body of text and includes a complete list of the sources you have actually cited in your paper. This list should contain all the information needed for the reader to locate the original source of the information, quote or statistic that directly contributed to your work. On the other hand, a bibliography is a comprehensive list of all the material you may have consulted throughout your research and writing process. Both provide the necessary information for readers to retrieve and check the sources cited in your work.
Each style’s guidelines will define the terminology of ‘ works cited ’ and ‘ bibliography ’, as well as providing formatting guidelines for font, line spacing and page indentations. In addition, it will instruct you on how to order your works cited list or bibliography – this will usually be either alphabetical or chronological (meaning the order that these sources appear in your work). Before submitting your work, be sure to check that you have formatted your whole paper – including your reference page and bibliography – according to your style’s formatting guidelines.
Sounds complicated? Referencing has never been so easy; Cite This For Me’s citation machine will automatically generate fully-formatted references for your works cited page or bibliography in your chosen style. Sign in to your Cite This For Me account to save and export your bibliography straight into Microsoft Word, Evernote, EndNote and more. If that sounds like too much work.
Although the citation generator will create your bibliography and works cited list for you in record time, it is still useful to understand how this system works behind the scenes. Understanding how a citation machine actually generates references will greatly increase the quality of your work.
As well as saving you time with its citation maker, Cite This For Me provides the learning resources to help you fully understand the citing process and the benefits of adopting great referencing standards.
The referencing process:
Create projects, add notes, cite directly from the browser and scan books’ barcodes with a mobile app.
Sign up to Cite This For Me – the ultimate citation management tool.
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Zissette S , Gautam A , Krumholz HM , Ross JS , Wallach JD. Altmetric Attention Scores and Citations of Published Research With or Without Preprints. JAMA Netw Open. 2024;7(7):e2424732. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.24732
© 2024
Use of preprints, defined as preliminary research reports that have not undergone peer review, in clinical and health science research has increased in recent years, partly because of the COVID-19 pandemic. 1 , 2 Although high-impact clinical journals have publication policies supportive of preprints, 3 concerns remain that posting a preprint before submission to a peer-reviewed journal may jeopardize publication, especially if the preprint generates media attention and citations. 4 While biology articles with corresponding preprints have received greater attention than those without, 5 little is known about the highest-impact clinical research. Therefore, we aimed to assess how frequently research articles published in the highest-impact clinical journals are preprinted and whether media attention and citations differed between articles with and without corresponding preprints.
In accordance with the Common Rule, this cross-sectional study was exempt from ethics review and informed consent because it used public nonidentifiable data. We followed the STROBE reporting guideline.
We identified 25 high-impact journals according to InCites Journal Citation Reports, including the 6 general and internal medicine journals and the 2 clinical medicine journals across 9 subspecialities with the highest impact factors ( Table 1 ). We also included JAMA Network Open as it publishes general and subspecialty clinical articles. We searched PubMed for all records of these journals indexed in 2022 (after the COVID-19 pandemic had largely subsided) and manually identified original research articles. First, we identified preprints automatically linked to published articles in the sample using the bioRxiv/medRxiv application programming interface (API). To locate preprints missed by the API or posted on other platforms, we used WebScrapingAPI to conduct Google searches of published article titles and screened the first 5 records mentioning medRxiv, bioRxiv, or Social Science Research Network. Second, we identified the Altmetric Attention Score (Altmetric API) and citations (Dimensions API) for each article as of March 2024.
Within each journal with at least 1 article with a preprint, we calculated the differences in median Altmetric scores and citations between articles with and without preprints. We used Wilcoxon signed-rank test to evaluate whether the median of the distribution of the differences between medians across the 25 journals differed from 0. Two-tailed P < .05 was considered statistically significant. Data analysis was performed with R, version 4.2.1 (R Project for Statistical Computing).
Among the 5739 research articles published in 25 journals with high impact factors in 2022, 425 (7.4%) articles in 23 journals had corresponding preprints, ranging from 0 to 41 (26.1%) articles ( Table 1 ). COVID-19–related articles were more likely than non-COVID-19–related articles to have corresponding preprints (257 of 1270 [20.2%] vs 168 of 4469 [3.8%]; P < .001).
The median (IQR) difference in medians between articles with and without preprints across journals was not significantly different from 0 for Altmetric Attention Scores (34.1 [6.0-191.0]; P = .33) or citations (8.0 [3.0-30.8]; P = .31) ( Table 2 ). These findings were consistent even after accounting for time from publication to analysis and when stratified by COVID-19–related and non-COVID-19–related articles.
The finding that 7.4% of published articles in high-impact journals in 2022 had corresponding preprints is similar to estimates in other fields. 5 However, unlike previous evaluations of publications and corresponding bioRxiv preprints, 5 , 6 this study found no differences in Altmetric Attention Scores or citations between articles with and without preprints in the first years after publication.
Study limitations include examining only publications in journals with high impact factors and postings in prominent preprint servers. Furthermore, it is possible that authors are more likely to preprint their most important articles and that the published version of these articles would have received more media attention and citations if they had not been preprinted. However, although not all preprints will subsequently be published in high-impact journals, the results suggest that, among published articles with corresponding preprints, preprinting is not associated with less media attention and lower citation counts.
Accepted for Publication: May 31, 2024.
Published: July 26, 2024. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.24732
Open Access: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC-BY License . © 2024 Zissette S et al. JAMA Network Open .
Corresponding Author: Joshua D. Wallach, PhD, MS, Department of Epidemiology, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, 1518 Clifton Rd NE, Claudia Nance Rollins Building, Room 3033 Atlanta, GA 30322 ( [email protected] ).
Author Contributions: Mr. Zissette and Dr. Wallach had full access to all of the data in the study and take responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.
Concept and design: Zissette, Gautam, Krumholz, Wallach.
Acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data: Zissette, Gautam, Ross, Wallach.
Drafting of the manuscript: Zissette, Wallach.
Critical review of the manuscript for important intellectual content: All authors.
Statistical analysis: Zissette.
Administrative, technical, or material support: Wallach.
Supervision: Wallach.
Conflict of Interest Disclosures: Dr Krumholz reported being a cofounder of medRxiv; receiving options for Element Science and Identifeye; receiving personal fees from F-Prime; being a cofounder of and holding equity in Hugo Health, Refactor Health, and ENSIGHT-AI; and being associated with research contracts through Yale University from Janssen, Kenvue, and Pfizer outside the submitted work. Dr Ross reported being a cofounder of medRxiv; receiving research support through Yale University from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Johnson & Johnson, Arnold Ventures, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH); being a Deputy Editor at JAMA ; and being an expert witness at the request of Relator’s attorneys (the Greene Law Firm) in a qui tam suit alleging violations of the False Claims Act and Anti-Kickback Statute against Biogen Inc that was settled in September 2022 outside the submitted work. Dr Wallach reported receiving research support from Arnold Ventures, FDA, Johnson & Johnson through the Yale Open Data Access project, and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism of the NIH and serving as a consultant to Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP and Dugan Law Firm APLC outside the submitted work. No other disclosures were reported.
Disclaimer: The contents herein are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official view of the NIH.
Data Sharing Statement: See the Supplement .
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Citations for cash: researchers have identified services where scholars can buy citations to their papers in bulk. Credit: Vergani_Fotografia/Getty
Research-integrity watchers are concerned about the growing ways in which scientists can fake or manipulate the citation counts of their studies. In recent months, increasingly bold practices have surfaced. One approach was revealed through a sting operation in which a group of researchers bought 50 citations to pad the Google Scholar profile of a fake scientist they had created.
The scientists bought the citations for US$300 from a firm that seems to sell bogus citations in bulk. This confirms the existence of a black market for faked references that research-integrity sleuths have long speculated about, says the team.
The science that’s never been cited
“We started to notice several Google Scholar profiles with questionable citation trends,” says Yasir Zaki, a computer scientist at New York University (NYU) Abu Dhabi, whose team described its sting operation in a February preprint 1 . “When a manuscript acquires hundreds of citations within days of publication, or when a scientist has an abrupt and large rise in citations, you know something is wrong.”
These practices are troublesome because many aspects of a researcher’s career depend on how many references their papers garner. Many institutions use citation counts to evaluate scientists, and citation numbers inform metrics such as the h -index, which aims to measure scholars’ productivity and the impact of their studies.
Citation manipulation can have real consequences. In June, Spanish newspaper El País reported that the country’s Research Ethics Committee has urged the University of Salamanca to investigate the work of its newly appointed rector, Juan Manuel Corchado, a computer scientist accused of artificially boosting his Google Scholar metrics. (Corchado did not respond to Nature ’s request for comment.)
Research-integrity watchers had already suspected that citations are for sale at paper mills , services that churn out low-quality studies and sell authorship slots on already-accepted papers, says Cyril Labbé, a computer scientist at Grenoble Alpes University in France. “Paper mills have the ability to insert citations into papers that they are selling,” he says.
In November 2023, analytics firm Clarivate in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, excluded more than 1,000 researchers from its annual list of highly cited researchers because of fears of citation gaming and ‘hyper-publishing’.
Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
In their sting operation, Zaki and his colleagues created a Google Scholar profile for a fictional scientist and uploaded 20 made-up studies that were created using artificial intelligence.
The team then approached a company, which they found while analysing suspicious citations linked to one of the authors in their data set, that seemed to be selling citations to Google Scholar profiles. The study authors contacted the firm by e-mail and later communicated through WhatsApp. The company offered 50 citations for $300 or 100 citations for $500. The authors opted for the first option and 40 days later 50 citations from studies in 22 journals — 14 of which are indexed by scholarly database Scopus — were added to the fictional researcher’s Google Scholar profile.
The team didn’t share the company’s name with Nature , citing concerns that revealing it could draw attention to its website, or the fake Google Scholar profile they created, because this might reveal the identities of the authors of the studies that planted the fake citations. Asked by Nature whether Google Scholar is aware that faked profiles can be created on its site, Anurag Acharya, distinguished engineer at the company said: “While academic misbehaviour is possible, it’s rare because all aspects are visible — articles indexed, articles included by an author on their profile, articles citing an author, where the citing articles are hosted and so on. Anyone in the world can call you on it.”
In another demonstration of citation manipulation, last month researchers created a fake Google Scholar profile for a cat called Larry listing a dozen fake papers with Larry as the sole author. The researchers posted a dozen more nonsensical studies on the academic social-networking site ResearchGate that cited Larry’s papers. A week or so after Larry’s identity was revealed, Google Scholar removed the cat’s studies, those citing Larry, and the accumulated citations. ResearchGate has also removed the bogus studies citing Larry.
Zaki and colleagues’ sting operation was born out of a broader effort to assess the scale of the fake-citation problem. They used software to examine about 1.6 million Google Scholar profiles that had at least 10 publications. They searched for profiles with more than 200 citations and instances in which researchers’ citations increased by 10 times or more each year or when the rise represented a jump of at least 25% of their total citation count. The team found 1,016 such profiles.
The fight against fake-paper factories that churn out sham science
Zaki says that many citations to the papers on those profiles are from preprint articles that haven’t been peer reviewed and that they are typically listed in the bibliographies of papers but not cited in the main body of the manuscripts.
“Citations can easily be manipulated by creating fake preprints and through paid services,” says co-author Talal Rahwan, a computer scientist at NYU Abu Dhabi.
The authors also surveyed 574 researchers working at the 10 highest-ranked universities in the world. They found that of those universities that consider citation counts when evaluating scientists, more than 60% obtain these data from Google Scholar.
Labbé isn’t convinced by the survey’s claim that Google Scholar is widely used to obtain researchers’ citation metrics. Allegations of citation manipulation on Google Scholar have surfaced in the past, he says, and academics have long suspected that there are vendors offering this sort of service. But the sting operation to reveal a citation seller is the first of its kind, he says.
Guillaume Cabanac, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse in France who has created a tool that flags fabricated papers that contain odd turns of phrase added to circumvent plagiarism-detection software, says that many studies are cropping up with citations to work that has nothing to do with the topic of the study.
Labbé’s team is building a tool that automatically flags fishy citation patterns that might point to manipulation.
How big is science’s fake-paper problem?
To help with that, Zaki’s team proposes a metric called the citation-concentration index, designed to detect cases in which a scientist receives many citations from few sources. Such activity is often a sign of a ‘citation ring’, in which scientists agree to cite one another to inflate each other’s metrics. “Suspicious ones tend to have massive citations stemming from just a few sources,” Rahwan says.
One fear among integrity sleuths is that fraudsters will conceive subtler practices to avoid being found out. For instance, one way to avoid being detected by the citation-concentration index, Labbé notes, is to buy a few citations at a time and not in bulk.
For Labbé, the way to address citation gaming is to change the incentives in academia so that scientists are not under pressure to accumulated as many citations as possible to progress their careers. “The pressure for publication and citation is detrimental to the behaviour of scientists,” he says.
Nature 632 , 966 (2024)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01672-7
Ibrahim, H., Liu, F., Zaki, Y. & Rahwan, T. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2402.04607 (2024).
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Academic journals, archives, and repositories are seeing an increasing number of questionable research papers clearly produced using generative AI. They are often created with widely available, general-purpose AI applications, most likely ChatGPT, and mimic scientific writing. Google Scholar easily locates and lists these questionable papers alongside reputable, quality-controlled research. Our analysis of a selection of questionable GPT-fabricated scientific papers found in Google Scholar shows that many are about applied, often controversial topics susceptible to disinformation: the environment, health, and computing. The resulting enhanced potential for malicious manipulation of society’s evidence base, particularly in politically divisive domains, is a growing concern.
Swedish School of Library and Information Science, University of Borås, Sweden
Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund University, Sweden
Division of Environmental Communication, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden
The use of ChatGPT to generate text for academic papers has raised concerns about research integrity. Discussion of this phenomenon is ongoing in editorials, commentaries, opinion pieces, and on social media (Bom, 2023; Stokel-Walker, 2024; Thorp, 2023). There are now several lists of papers suspected of GPT misuse, and new papers are constantly being added. 1 See for example Academ-AI, https://www.academ-ai.info/ , and Retraction Watch, https://retractionwatch.com/papers-and-peer-reviews-with-evidence-of-chatgpt-writing/ . While many legitimate uses of GPT for research and academic writing exist (Huang & Tan, 2023; Kitamura, 2023; Lund et al., 2023), its undeclared use—beyond proofreading—has potentially far-reaching implications for both science and society, but especially for their relationship. It, therefore, seems important to extend the discussion to one of the most accessible and well-known intermediaries between science, but also certain types of misinformation, and the public, namely Google Scholar, also in response to the legitimate concerns that the discussion of generative AI and misinformation needs to be more nuanced and empirically substantiated (Simon et al., 2023).
Google Scholar, https://scholar.google.com , is an easy-to-use academic search engine. It is available for free, and its index is extensive (Gusenbauer & Haddaway, 2020). It is also often touted as a credible source for academic literature and even recommended in library guides, by media and information literacy initiatives, and fact checkers (Tripodi et al., 2023). However, Google Scholar lacks the transparency and adherence to standards that usually characterize citation databases. Instead, Google Scholar uses automated crawlers, like Google’s web search engine (Martín-Martín et al., 2021), and the inclusion criteria are based on primarily technical standards, allowing any individual author—with or without scientific affiliation—to upload papers to be indexed (Google Scholar Help, n.d.). It has been shown that Google Scholar is susceptible to manipulation through citation exploits (Antkare, 2020) and by providing access to fake scientific papers (Dadkhah et al., 2017). A large part of Google Scholar’s index consists of publications from established scientific journals or other forms of quality-controlled, scholarly literature. However, the index also contains a large amount of gray literature, including student papers, working papers, reports, preprint servers, and academic networking sites, as well as material from so-called “questionable” academic journals, including paper mills. The search interface does not offer the possibility to filter the results meaningfully by material type, publication status, or form of quality control, such as limiting the search to peer-reviewed material.
To understand the occurrence of ChatGPT (co-)authored work in Google Scholar’s index, we scraped it for publications, including one of two common ChatGPT responses (see Appendix A) that we encountered on social media and in media reports (DeGeurin, 2024). The results of our descriptive statistical analyses showed that around 62% did not declare the use of GPTs. Most of these GPT-fabricated papers were found in non-indexed journals and working papers, but some cases included research published in mainstream scientific journals and conference proceedings. 2 Indexed journals mean scholarly journals indexed by abstract and citation databases such as Scopus and Web of Science, where the indexation implies journals with high scientific quality. Non-indexed journals are journals that fall outside of this indexation. More than half (57%) of these GPT-fabricated papers concerned policy-relevant subject areas susceptible to influence operations. To avoid increasing the visibility of these publications, we abstained from referencing them in this research note. However, we have made the data available in the Harvard Dataverse repository.
The publications were related to three issue areas—health (14.5%), environment (19.5%) and computing (23%)—with key terms such “healthcare,” “COVID-19,” or “infection”for health-related papers, and “analysis,” “sustainable,” and “global” for environment-related papers. In several cases, the papers had titles that strung together general keywords and buzzwords, thus alluding to very broad and current research. These terms included “biology,” “telehealth,” “climate policy,” “diversity,” and “disrupting,” to name just a few. While the study’s scope and design did not include a detailed analysis of which parts of the articles included fabricated text, our dataset did contain the surrounding sentences for each occurrence of the suspicious phrases that formed the basis for our search and subsequent selection. Based on that, we can say that the phrases occurred in most sections typically found in scientific publications, including the literature review, methods, conceptual and theoretical frameworks, background, motivation or societal relevance, and even discussion. This was confirmed during the joint coding, where we read and discussed all articles. It became clear that not just the text related to the telltale phrases was created by GPT, but that almost all articles in our sample of questionable articles likely contained traces of GPT-fabricated text everywhere.
Evidence hacking and backfiring effects
Generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) can be used to produce texts that mimic scientific writing. These texts, when made available online—as we demonstrate—leak into the databases of academic search engines and other parts of the research infrastructure for scholarly communication. This development exacerbates problems that were already present with less sophisticated text generators (Antkare, 2020; Cabanac & Labbé, 2021). Yet, the public release of ChatGPT in 2022, together with the way Google Scholar works, has increased the likelihood of lay people (e.g., media, politicians, patients, students) coming across questionable (or even entirely GPT-fabricated) papers and other problematic research findings. Previous research has emphasized that the ability to determine the value and status of scientific publications for lay people is at stake when misleading articles are passed off as reputable (Haider & Åström, 2017) and that systematic literature reviews risk being compromised (Dadkhah et al., 2017). It has also been highlighted that Google Scholar, in particular, can be and has been exploited for manipulating the evidence base for politically charged issues and to fuel conspiracy narratives (Tripodi et al., 2023). Both concerns are likely to be magnified in the future, increasing the risk of what we suggest calling evidence hacking —the strategic and coordinated malicious manipulation of society’s evidence base.
The authority of quality-controlled research as evidence to support legislation, policy, politics, and other forms of decision-making is undermined by the presence of undeclared GPT-fabricated content in publications professing to be scientific. Due to the large number of archives, repositories, mirror sites, and shadow libraries to which they spread, there is a clear risk that GPT-fabricated, questionable papers will reach audiences even after a possible retraction. There are considerable technical difficulties involved in identifying and tracing computer-fabricated papers (Cabanac & Labbé, 2021; Dadkhah et al., 2023; Jones, 2024), not to mention preventing and curbing their spread and uptake.
However, as the rise of the so-called anti-vaxx movement during the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing obstruction and denial of climate change show, retracting erroneous publications often fuels conspiracies and increases the following of these movements rather than stopping them. To illustrate this mechanism, climate deniers frequently question established scientific consensus by pointing to other, supposedly scientific, studies that support their claims. Usually, these are poorly executed, not peer-reviewed, based on obsolete data, or even fraudulent (Dunlap & Brulle, 2020). A similar strategy is successful in the alternative epistemic world of the global anti-vaccination movement (Carrion, 2018) and the persistence of flawed and questionable publications in the scientific record already poses significant problems for health research, policy, and lawmakers, and thus for society as a whole (Littell et al., 2024). Considering that a person’s support for “doing your own research” is associated with increased mistrust in scientific institutions (Chinn & Hasell, 2023), it will be of utmost importance to anticipate and consider such backfiring effects already when designing a technical solution, when suggesting industry or legal regulation, and in the planning of educational measures.
Recommendations
Solutions should be based on simultaneous considerations of technical, educational, and regulatory approaches, as well as incentives, including social ones, across the entire research infrastructure. Paying attention to how these approaches and incentives relate to each other can help identify points and mechanisms for disruption. Recognizing fraudulent academic papers must happen alongside understanding how they reach their audiences and what reasons there might be for some of these papers successfully “sticking around.” A possible way to mitigate some of the risks associated with GPT-fabricated scholarly texts finding their way into academic search engine results would be to provide filtering options for facets such as indexed journals, gray literature, peer-review, and similar on the interface of publicly available academic search engines. Furthermore, evaluation tools for indexed journals 3 Such as LiU Journal CheckUp, https://ep.liu.se/JournalCheckup/default.aspx?lang=eng . could be integrated into the graphical user interfaces and the crawlers of these academic search engines. To enable accountability, it is important that the index (database) of such a search engine is populated according to criteria that are transparent, open to scrutiny, and appropriate to the workings of science and other forms of academic research. Moreover, considering that Google Scholar has no real competitor, there is a strong case for establishing a freely accessible, non-specialized academic search engine that is not run for commercial reasons but for reasons of public interest. Such measures, together with educational initiatives aimed particularly at policymakers, science communicators, journalists, and other media workers, will be crucial to reducing the possibilities for and effects of malicious manipulation or evidence hacking. It is important not to present this as a technical problem that exists only because of AI text generators but to relate it to the wider concerns in which it is embedded. These range from a largely dysfunctional scholarly publishing system (Haider & Åström, 2017) and academia’s “publish or perish” paradigm to Google’s near-monopoly and ideological battles over the control of information and ultimately knowledge. Any intervention is likely to have systemic effects; these effects need to be considered and assessed in advance and, ideally, followed up on.
Our study focused on a selection of papers that were easily recognizable as fraudulent. We used this relatively small sample as a magnifying glass to examine, delineate, and understand a problem that goes beyond the scope of the sample itself, which however points towards larger concerns that require further investigation. The work of ongoing whistleblowing initiatives 4 Such as Academ-AI, https://www.academ-ai.info/ , and Retraction Watch, https://retractionwatch.com/papers-and-peer-reviews-with-evidence-of-chatgpt-writing/ . , recent media reports of journal closures (Subbaraman, 2024), or GPT-related changes in word use and writing style (Cabanac et al., 2021; Stokel-Walker, 2024) suggest that we only see the tip of the iceberg. There are already more sophisticated cases (Dadkhah et al., 2023) as well as cases involving fabricated images (Gu et al., 2022). Our analysis shows that questionable and potentially manipulative GPT-fabricated papers permeate the research infrastructure and are likely to become a widespread phenomenon. Our findings underline that the risk of fake scientific papers being used to maliciously manipulate evidence (see Dadkhah et al., 2017) must be taken seriously. Manipulation may involve undeclared automatic summaries of texts, inclusion in literature reviews, explicit scientific claims, or the concealment of errors in studies so that they are difficult to detect in peer review. However, the mere possibility of these things happening is a significant risk in its own right that can be strategically exploited and will have ramifications for trust in and perception of science. Society’s methods of evaluating sources and the foundations of media and information literacy are under threat and public trust in science is at risk of further erosion, with far-reaching consequences for society in dealing with information disorders. To address this multifaceted problem, we first need to understand why it exists and proliferates.
Finding 1: 139 GPT-fabricated, questionable papers were found and listed as regular results on the Google Scholar results page. Non-indexed journals dominate.
Most questionable papers we found were in non-indexed journals or were working papers, but we did also find some in established journals, publications, conferences, and repositories. We found a total of 139 papers with a suspected deceptive use of ChatGPT or similar LLM applications (see Table 1). Out of these, 19 were in indexed journals, 89 were in non-indexed journals, 19 were student papers found in university databases, and 12 were working papers (mostly in preprint databases). Table 1 divides these papers into categories. Health and environment papers made up around 34% (47) of the sample. Of these, 66% were present in non-indexed journals.
Indexed journals* | 5 | 3 | 4 | 7 | 19 |
Non-indexed journals | 18 | 18 | 13 | 40 | 89 |
Student papers | 4 | 3 | 1 | 11 | 19 |
Working papers | 5 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 12 |
Total | 32 | 27 | 20 | 60 | 139 |
Finding 2: GPT-fabricated, questionable papers are disseminated online, permeating the research infrastructure for scholarly communication, often in multiple copies. Applied topics with practical implications dominate.
The 20 papers concerning health-related issues are distributed across 20 unique domains, accounting for 46 URLs. The 27 papers dealing with environmental issues can be found across 26 unique domains, accounting for 56 URLs. Most of the identified papers exist in multiple copies and have already spread to several archives, repositories, and social media. It would be difficult, or impossible, to remove them from the scientific record.
As apparent from Table 2, GPT-fabricated, questionable papers are seeping into most parts of the online research infrastructure for scholarly communication. Platforms on which identified papers have appeared include ResearchGate, ORCiD, Journal of Population Therapeutics and Clinical Pharmacology (JPTCP), Easychair, Frontiers, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineer (IEEE), and X/Twitter. Thus, even if they are retracted from their original source, it will prove very difficult to track, remove, or even just mark them up on other platforms. Moreover, unless regulated, Google Scholar will enable their continued and most likely unlabeled discoverability.
Environment | researchgate.net (13) | orcid.org (4) | easychair.org (3) | ijope.com* (3) | publikasiindonesia.id (3) |
Health | researchgate.net (15) | ieee.org (4) | twitter.com (3) | jptcp.com** (2) | frontiersin.org (2) |
A word rain visualization (Centre for Digital Humanities Uppsala, 2023), which combines word prominences through TF-IDF 5 Term frequency–inverse document frequency , a method for measuring the significance of a word in a document compared to its frequency across all documents in a collection. scores with semantic similarity of the full texts of our sample of GPT-generated articles that fall into the “Environment” and “Health” categories, reflects the two categories in question. However, as can be seen in Figure 1, it also reveals overlap and sub-areas. The y-axis shows word prominences through word positions and font sizes, while the x-axis indicates semantic similarity. In addition to a certain amount of overlap, this reveals sub-areas, which are best described as two distinct events within the word rain. The event on the left bundles terms related to the development and management of health and healthcare with “challenges,” “impact,” and “potential of artificial intelligence”emerging as semantically related terms. Terms related to research infrastructures, environmental, epistemic, and technological concepts are arranged further down in the same event (e.g., “system,” “climate,” “understanding,” “knowledge,” “learning,” “education,” “sustainable”). A second distinct event further to the right bundles terms associated with fish farming and aquatic medicinal plants, highlighting the presence of an aquaculture cluster. Here, the prominence of groups of terms such as “used,” “model,” “-based,” and “traditional” suggests the presence of applied research on these topics. The two events making up the word rain visualization, are linked by a less dominant but overlapping cluster of terms related to “energy” and “water.”
The bar chart of the terms in the paper subset (see Figure 2) complements the word rain visualization by depicting the most prominent terms in the full texts along the y-axis. Here, word prominences across health and environment papers are arranged descendingly, where values outside parentheses are TF-IDF values (relative frequencies) and values inside parentheses are raw term frequencies (absolute frequencies).
Finding 3: Google Scholar presents results from quality-controlled and non-controlled citation databases on the same interface, providing unfiltered access to GPT-fabricated questionable papers.
Google Scholar’s central position in the publicly accessible scholarly communication infrastructure, as well as its lack of standards, transparency, and accountability in terms of inclusion criteria, has potentially serious implications for public trust in science. This is likely to exacerbate the already-known potential to exploit Google Scholar for evidence hacking (Tripodi et al., 2023) and will have implications for any attempts to retract or remove fraudulent papers from their original publication venues. Any solution must consider the entirety of the research infrastructure for scholarly communication and the interplay of different actors, interests, and incentives.
We searched and scraped Google Scholar using the Python library Scholarly (Cholewiak et al., 2023) for papers that included specific phrases known to be common responses from ChatGPT and similar applications with the same underlying model (GPT3.5 or GPT4): “as of my last knowledge update” and/or “I don’t have access to real-time data” (see Appendix A). This facilitated the identification of papers that likely used generative AI to produce text, resulting in 227 retrieved papers. The papers’ bibliographic information was automatically added to a spreadsheet and downloaded into Zotero. 6 An open-source reference manager, https://zotero.org .
We employed multiple coding (Barbour, 2001) to classify the papers based on their content. First, we jointly assessed whether the paper was suspected of fraudulent use of ChatGPT (or similar) based on how the text was integrated into the papers and whether the paper was presented as original research output or the AI tool’s role was acknowledged. Second, in analyzing the content of the papers, we continued the multiple coding by classifying the fraudulent papers into four categories identified during an initial round of analysis—health, environment, computing, and others—and then determining which subjects were most affected by this issue (see Table 1). Out of the 227 retrieved papers, 88 papers were written with legitimate and/or declared use of GPTs (i.e., false positives, which were excluded from further analysis), and 139 papers were written with undeclared and/or fraudulent use (i.e., true positives, which were included in further analysis). The multiple coding was conducted jointly by all authors of the present article, who collaboratively coded and cross-checked each other’s interpretation of the data simultaneously in a shared spreadsheet file. This was done to single out coding discrepancies and settle coding disagreements, which in turn ensured methodological thoroughness and analytical consensus (see Barbour, 2001). Redoing the category coding later based on our established coding schedule, we achieved an intercoder reliability (Cohen’s kappa) of 0.806 after eradicating obvious differences.
The ranking algorithm of Google Scholar prioritizes highly cited and older publications (Martín-Martín et al., 2016). Therefore, the position of the articles on the search engine results pages was not particularly informative, considering the relatively small number of results in combination with the recency of the publications. Only the query “as of my last knowledge update” had more than two search engine result pages. On those, questionable articles with undeclared use of GPTs were evenly distributed across all result pages (min: 4, max: 9, mode: 8), with the proportion of undeclared use being slightly higher on average on later search result pages.
To understand how the papers making fraudulent use of generative AI were disseminated online, we programmatically searched for the paper titles (with exact string matching) in Google Search from our local IP address (see Appendix B) using the googlesearch – python library(Vikramaditya, 2020). We manually verified each search result to filter out false positives—results that were not related to the paper—and then compiled the most prominent URLs by field. This enabled the identification of other platforms through which the papers had been spread. We did not, however, investigate whether copies had spread into SciHub or other shadow libraries, or if they were referenced in Wikipedia.
We used descriptive statistics to count the prevalence of the number of GPT-fabricated papers across topics and venues and top domains by subject. The pandas software library for the Python programming language (The pandas development team, 2024) was used for this part of the analysis. Based on the multiple coding, paper occurrences were counted in relation to their categories, divided into indexed journals, non-indexed journals, student papers, and working papers. The schemes, subdomains, and subdirectories of the URL strings were filtered out while top-level domains and second-level domains were kept, which led to normalizing domain names. This, in turn, allowed the counting of domain frequencies in the environment and health categories. To distinguish word prominences and meanings in the environment and health-related GPT-fabricated questionable papers, a semantically-aware word cloud visualization was produced through the use of a word rain (Centre for Digital Humanities Uppsala, 2023) for full-text versions of the papers. Font size and y-axis positions indicate word prominences through TF-IDF scores for the environment and health papers (also visualized in a separate bar chart with raw term frequencies in parentheses), and words are positioned along the x-axis to reflect semantic similarity (Skeppstedt et al., 2024), with an English Word2vec skip gram model space (Fares et al., 2017). An English stop word list was used, along with a manually produced list including terms such as “https,” “volume,” or “years.”
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This research has been supported by Mistra, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research, through the research program Mistra Environmental Communication (Haider, Ekström, Rödl) and the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation [2020.0004] (Söderström).
The authors declare no competing interests.
The research described in this article was carried out under Swedish legislation. According to the relevant EU and Swedish legislation (2003:460) on the ethical review of research involving humans (“Ethical Review Act”), the research reported on here is not subject to authorization by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (“etikprövningsmyndigheten”) (SRC, 2017).
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original author and source are properly credited.
All data needed to replicate this study are available at the Harvard Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/WUVD8X
The authors wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on the article manuscript as well as the editorial group of Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review for their thoughtful feedback and input.
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In an MLA Works Cited entry for a journal article, the article title appears in quotation marks, the name of the journal in italics—both in title case. List up to two authors in both the in-text citation and the Works Cited entry. For three or more, use "et al.". MLA format. Author last name, First name.
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If you want to cite a special issue of a journal rather than a regular article, the name (s) of the editor (s) and the title of the issue appear in place of the author's name and article title: APA format. Last name, Initials. (Ed. or Eds.). (Year). Title of issue [Special issue]. Journal Name, Volume (Issue).
Narrative citation: Grady et al. (2019) If a journal article has a DOI, include the DOI in the reference. Always include the issue number for a journal article. If the journal article does not have a DOI and is from an academic research database, end the reference after the page range (for an explanation of why, see the database information ...
If an item has no date, use n.d. where you would normally put the date. Capitalization: For article titles, capitalize only the first letter of the first word of the title. If there is a colon in the title, capitalize the first letter of the first word after the colon. You will also capitalize proper nouns.
Citing journal articles in APA. A journal is a scholarly periodical that presents research from experts in a certain field. Typically, but not always, these journals are peer-reviewed in order to ensure that published articles are of the highest quality. That is one reason why journals are a highly credible source of information.
Basic guidelines for formatting the reference list at the end of a standard APA research paper Author/Authors Rules for handling works by a single author or multiple authors that apply to all APA-style references in your reference list, regardless of the type of work (book, article, electronic resource, etc.) ...
If an article doesn't appear on continuous pages, list all the page numbers the article is on, separated by commas. For example (4, 6, 12-14) Library Database. Do not include the name of a database for works obtained from most academic research databases (e.g. APA PsycInfo, CINAHL) because works in these resources are widely available.
Parenthetical citation: (Carey, 2019) Narrative citation: Carey (2019) If the newspaper article is from an academic research database, end the reference after the page range. Do not include database information in the reference. The reference in this case is the same as for a print newspaper article.
How to Cite a Journal Article in Print or Online in APA Format. Articles differ from book citations in that the publisher and publisher location are not included. For journal articles, these are replaced with the journal title, volume number, issue number and page number. The basic structure is: Journal Article Examples: Mitchell, J.A. (2017).
It publishes original research articles, reviews and special reports on all aspects of flavor and fragrance. Another example is "Nordic Pulp and Paper Research," a style used by an international scientific magazine covering science and technology for the areas of wood or bio-mass constituents. 4.
Stay up to date! Get research tips and citation information or just enjoy some fun posts from our student blog. Citation Machine® helps students and professionals properly credit the information that they use. Cite sources in APA, MLA, Chicago, Turabian, and Harvard for free.
APA uses a reference list , an alphabetized list of sources following the end of the book or paper, for its complete list of sources referenced. This list should be titled "References" in bold and alphabetized by the first item in the citation, which, in most cases, is the author's last name. Each reference from this list must be cited in your ...
MLA in-text citation. (Eve and Street 84) If an article has three or more authors, include only the first author's name, followed by " et al. ". MLA journal citation: 3+ authors. MLA format. Author last name, First name, et al. " Article Title.". Journal Name, vol. Volume, no. Issue, Month Year, Page range. DOI or URL. MLA Works Cited ...
Article in Electronic Journal. As noted above, when citing an article in an electronic journal, include a DOI if one is associated with the article. Baniya, S., & Weech, S. (2019). Data and experience design: Negotiating community-oriented digital research with service-learning. Purdue Journal of Service-Learning and International Engagement, 6 ...
APA Style (7th Edition) These OWL resources will help you learn how to use the American Psychological Association (APA) citation and format style. This section contains resources on in-text citation and the References page, as well as APA sample papers, slide presentations, and the APA classroom poster.
An APA citation generator is a software tool that will automatically format academic citations in the American Psychological Association (APA) style. It will usually request vital details about a source -- like the authors, title, and publish date -- and will output these details with the correct punctuation and layout required by the official ...
APA Citation Basics. When using APA format, follow the author-date method of in-text citation. This means that the author's last name and the year of publication for the source should appear in the text, like, for example, (Jones, 1998). One complete reference for each source should appear in the reference list at the end of the paper.
the source for works that are part of a greater whole (journal article, edited book chapter, etc.) is the greater whole (i.e., the journal), and the DOI or URL the source for works that stand alone (book, report, dissertation, film, social media site, webpage, etc.) includes the publisher of the work, database, social media page, or website ...
APA Style is widely used by students, researchers, and professionals in the social and behavioral sciences. Scribbr's free citation generator automatically generates accurate references and in-text citations. This citation guide outlines the most important citation guidelines from the 7th edition APA Publication Manual (2020).
Three popular citation formats are MLA Style (for humanities articles) and APA or Chicago (for social sciences articles). MLA style (print journal article): Whisenant, Warren A. "How Women Have Fared as Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Since the Passage of Title IX." Sex Roles Vol. 49.3 (2003): 179-182. APA style (print journal article):
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. Search across a wide variety of disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions.
Use Cite This For Me's FREE citation machine to get accurate citations in seconds. Sign up now & choose from over 1,000 styles including APA, MLA, Chicago & ASA. ... Simply put, referencing is the citing of sources used in essays, articles, research, conferences etc. When another source contributes to your work, you have to give the original ...
Among the 5739 research articles published in 25 journals with high impact factors in 2022, 425 (7.4%) articles in 23 journals had corresponding preprints, ranging from 0 to 41 (26.1%) articles . COVID-19-related articles were more likely than non-COVID-19-related articles to have corresponding preprints (257 of 1270 [20.2%] vs 168 of 4469 ...
Research-integrity watchers are concerned about the growing ways in which scientists can fake or manipulate the citation counts of their studies. In recent months, increasingly bold practices have ...
The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation is the main style guide for legal citations in the US. It's widely used in law, and also when legal materials need to be cited in other disciplines. Bluebook footnote citation. 1 David E. Pozen, Freedom of Information Beyond the Freedom of Information Act, 165, U. P🇦 .
Background Podcasts have become an increasingly popular method of communicating information in medicine, including in radiology. However, the effect of podcasts on the reach of journal articles remains unclear. Purpose To evaluate the influence of Radiology podcasts on the performance metrics, including downloads, citations, and Altmetric Attention Score (AAS), of Radiology articles. Materials ...
Academic journals, archives, and repositories are seeing an increasing number of questionable research papers clearly produced using generative AI. They are often created with widely available, general-purpose AI applications, most likely ChatGPT, and mimic scientific writing. Google Scholar easily locates and lists these questionable papers alongside reputable, quality-controlled research.
How to Cite Sources | Citation Generator & Quick Guide. Citing your sources is essential in academic writing.Whenever you quote or paraphrase a source (such as a book, article, or webpage), you have to include a citation crediting the original author.. Failing to properly cite your sources counts as plagiarism, since you're presenting someone else's ideas as if they were your own.